The Signature that Still Haunts Lithuania

A Lithuanian state archive preserves the orders signed by my grandfather during the Holocaust: the seizure of Jewish property, the confinement of Jews, and the machinery of extermination in Šiauliai County. The documents remain. The question is why Lithuania still defends the men who signed them.

He was my grandfather. He signed Šiauliai County Chief Order No. 3687 on October 15, 1941. The order is preserved in the Lithuanian Central State Archive, fund R-1099, list 1, file 2, folio 451.[1] It directs every district chief and every mayor in Šiauliai County to sell items confiscated from Jews and to deposit the proceeds into a special account of the District Commissariat at the Reich Credit Bank in Šiauliai. He signed his name. He routed it for execution to a colonel under his authority. The colonel is named on the page: Aloyzas Banys.

He was the local link

By October 15, 1941, many of the owners of the property being liquidated had already been murdered. Others had been sealed into ghettos, stripped of possessions before later selections, deportations, and liquidation. The Šiauliai Ghetto had been sealed. The pits at Kužiai, at Pročiūnai, at Bubiai, at Žagarė had received their slaughter victims. “Confiscated Jewish property” is a phrase from a state record. It refers to belongings taken from murdered families. The clothes had owners. The cooking pots had owners. The watches had owners. The owners had names. The state knew the owners’ names and chose to render them as property.

The German District Commissar issued the underlying directive. My grandfather countersigned it as Šiauliai County Chief and routed it for execution to Col. Banys with a single Lithuanian word: Vykdyti. Execute. The secretary of the County Chief’s institution, Tamašauskas, attested the copy as true. The chain ran from Berlin through my grandfather’s office to every village in his county. He was not at the edge of the chain. He was the local link.

The money went to the Reichskreditkasse, the Wehrmacht’s field bank. Lithuanian-administered receipts from the property of murdered Jewish families flowed into the financial system that paid for the war and the killing. My grandfather’s office did not assist the Holocaust. It was a department of the Holocaust.

Reading my own family record

I have read the archive. I read it before I wrote Storm in the Land of Rain.[2] I read more of it after the book appeared. Fund R-1099 holds other orders my grandfather signed. Concentration of Jews. Seizure of Jewish property. The administration of the events at Žagarė. None of this is hidden. It sits in a state archive. Any researcher with credentials can request it. The state has not lost the documents. It has lost the will to read them.

My mother, on her deathbed, asked me to write about my grandfather. I have been called a traitor for it by people who loved me, and by people who did not know me.

The Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre, the LGGRTC, has had access to the same archive I have read. In 2019 the LGGRTC issued a public defense of my grandfather as a national hero.[3] The defense did not deny the documents. It did not claim he was uninvolved. It argued that his collaboration was a tactic of resistance against the Communists. What was left unsaid was that all Jews were considered Communists and had to be eliminated.

The Eichmann defense reborn

The state of Lithuania did not stop at the LGGRTC. The state funded a legal defense. The state-funded defense, filed by attorney Liudvika Meškauskaitė, argued that Jonas Noreika — Lithuanian state-honored figure, district chief, signatory of orders consigning Jews to ghettos in the Šiauliai district where they were then shot — “could not have possibly understood” that his orders would lead to Jewish deaths. He was, the filing held, “yet another cog caught in the Nazi machine” —  that he was just following orders. This is the Eichmann defense. The world rejected it in Jerusalem in 1961. Lithuania has embraced it in Vilnius in the twenty-first century.[4]

Everyone knew what was happening

At that time period, everyone in Lithuania understood what was happening to the Jews. They were disappearing by the hundreds overnight, often marched openly through the streets into the ghettoes, into the synagogues, or straight into the woods where they were executed primarily by Lithuanians.

He was not just a cog in the Nazi machine. He ordered the executions of 1,800 Jews in Plunge a month earlier while he was leading the rebellion in that region against the Communists. For his exemplary service, the Lithuanians rewarded him less than a month later by naming him chair of the Siauliai region, where he held the highest position a Lithuanian could hold under the Nazis. He was only 30 years old.

Artur Fridman/Modern Lithuania

Now consider Artur Fridman.

Fridman is a Lithuanian Jewish citizen. He posted on Facebook that Lithuanian Holocaust collaborators are honored in Lithuania while their Jewish victims are not. The Lithuanian state has charged him under Article 170² §1 of its criminal code for denying Lithuanian crimes against humanity. The indictment runs to 220 pages. Case No. 02-2-00512-24 is active.[5]

Valdas Rakutis used International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2021 to accuse Jews of Holocaust perpetration. He was not prosecuted.[6] Free speech protects state-honored falsehoods and prosecutes the citizen who reads the archive. Lithuania has not punished a single Holocaust perpetrator named in R-1099.

Aloyzas Banys/Diaspora Reckoning

The man my grandfather routed the order to, Col. Aloyzas Banys, withdrew to Germany at the end of the war. He emigrated to the United States. He married. He died in Stamford, Connecticut, in 1966. I have found no public record of prosecution, extradition, confession, or reckoning.

Many Lithuanians who fled west carried no examined record. Some were innocent. Some were not. I wish for every descendant of a Lithuanian who came west in 1944 and 1945 to examine their own family record, as I have examined mine, and to come to a reckoning with the truth.

Grant Gochin

Grant Gochin has filed forty-nine documented formal submissions to Lithuanian state bodies since 2015. Eight lawsuits and international filings. Eleven LGGRTC complaints. Five Article 170² §1 complaints. Eleven institutional petitions. Two Journalist Ethics filings. Twelve letters. He has spent his own money. He has received every refusal.[7] ECHR Application No. 10930/21 was filed on February 11, 2021 and later declared inadmissible. It remains part of the documentary record. Antisemitism is a national security concern of free states. For the broader framing of that concern, the document my grandfather signed in 1941 belongs in the record.[8]

My grandfather signed it/Reconciliation

I am the granddaughter of the perpetrator. Grant Gochin is the descendant of the murdered. Our friendship proves that reconciliation is possible. But reconciliation cannot be built on state fraud. The state we are addressing is one state. The archive we are quoting is one archive. The order is one order. My grandfather signed it. Banys was ordered to execute it. The money was directed to the Reichskreditkasse. Lithuania preserved the proof. Lithuania refuses the conclusion.

Wishing you truth and peace in the storms of your life,

Silvia Foti

[1]LCVA (Lietuvos centrinis valstybės archyvas), fund R-1099, list 1, file 2, folio 451: Šiauliai County Chief Order No. 3687, October 15, 1941, signed by Jonas Noreika as Šiauliai County Chief, transmitting an order of the Šiauliai District Commissar directing the sale of confiscated Jewish property through county-level commissions and the deposit of proceeds into the District Commissariat’s account at the Reichskreditkasse, Šiauliai. Routing notation to Col. A. Banys: “Vykdyti.” Attestation by Tamašauskas, Secretary of the Office of the Šiauliai County Chief. Source document: archival image of the original order; English translation and Chicago citation reference.

[2]Silvia Foti, Storm in the Land of Rain: A Mother’s Dying Wish Becomes Her Daughter’s Nightmare (Regnery History, 2022), https://www.regnery.com/9781684513024/storm-in-the-land-of-rain/.

[3]Lietuvos gyventojų genocido ir rezistencijos tyrimo centras (LGGRTC), public materials concerning Jonas Noreika, 2019. Cross-reference: Grant Gochin, “Lithuania’s Holocaust Honor System,” https://grantgochin.substack.com/p/lithuanias-holocaust-honor-system.

[4]Grant Gochin, “The Eichmann Defense,” Times of Israel, https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-eichmann-defense/. On the Lithuanian Jewish Community’s contemporaneous response to the LGGRTC defense, see Lithuanian Jewish Community statement, April 11, 2019.

[5]Republic of Lithuania v. Artur Fridman, Case No. 02-2-00512-24, 220-page indictment under Articles 170² §1 and 313 §2. See Grant Gochin, “Seven Years Before Fridman,” Times of Israel, https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/seven-years-before-fridman/; Grant Gochin, “The indictment that put Lithuania on trial,” JNS, March 16, 2026, https://www.jns.org/opinion/grant-gochin/the-indictment-that-put-lithuania-on-trial; Grant Gochin, “The Prosecution of Artur Fridman,” Times of Israel, https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-prosecution-of-artur-fridman/.

[6]Valdas Rakutis, “International Holocaust Day and Historical Memory,” January 27, 2021, republished by the Lithuanian Jewish Community, https://www.lzb.lt/en/2021/01/27/international-holocaust-day-and-historical-memory/; Cnaan Liphshiz, “In Holocaust memorial day speech, Lithuanian lawmaker says Jews and communists share blame,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, January 27, 2021, https://www.jta.org/2021/01/27/global/in-holocaust-memorial-day-speech-lithuanian-lawmaker-says-jews-and-communists-share-blame; see also Grant Gochin, “The Rakutis Standard,” https://grantgochin.substack.com/p/the-rakutis-standard.

[7]Composition: 8 lawsuits and international filings, 11 LGGRTC complaints, 5 Article 170² §1 complaints, 11 institutional petitions, 2 Journalist Ethics filings, 12 letters. Master inventory: Lithuania litigation listing as of May 5, 2026. ECHR Application No. 10930/21 was filed on February 11, 2021 and later declared inadmissible; see ECHR inadmissibility letter.

[8]For the broader framing of antisemitism as a national security concern of free states, see Hudson Institute, Antisemitism as a National Security Threat, https://www.hudson.org/events/antisemitism-national-security-threat.